How to Stop Time

My headache pounds and I feel weak and I have to step back almost as if the past is something that could thin the air, or affect the laws of gravity.

'Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that—and we shall—there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is .’

It was like being stuck in the same song, with a chorus you had once liked but now made you want to rip your ears off.

The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human .

I never tired of the way birds moved when they weren't in flight. It was a series of tableaux rather than continuous movement. Staccato. Stuck moments.

‘History isn't something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn't politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything.’

Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold

I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves.

Even though I hadn't seen Rose since 1603 the love was still there, exactly as strong, and now it was hurting. It was hurting more than any physical pain could try to.